Dragonoak: The Complete History of Kastelir

by Sam Farren

  The blade was in desperate need of a sharpening but it did the trick; the wolf stopped struggling.

  At least someone was having a worse day than I was.

  “Easy now, easy now,” I murmured to the trembling sheep, trying to coax them back out into the open. Didn't they know they were only making it easier for the wolves when they huddled together like that? “It's alright now—the wolf's not going to bother anyone anymore.”

  In the end, the lambs were the bravest of all. They didn't know enough to cling to fear.

  I spent the afternoon focused on finding the gap in the fence. I discovered it all too quickly and took my time repairing it with what I had around me; large rocks to block the hole the wolf had dug, dirt to cover it back up.

  From there, I squinted down at the village and tried to imagine the colours it was draped in. In all likeliness, the worn decorations reserved for the Phoenix Festival had been brought out. I consoled myself with the knowledge that no matter how thrilled the villagers were by such a turn of events, at least they were forced to think of me. They'd be on edge, certain that I'd find some new way to ruin things for them.

  The sun was showing signs of setting by the time Michael joined me. He walked, and I didn't run to meet him.

  “Not the year for it, is it?” he said, spreading his hands out in front of me to emphasise what it was. “Fifteen hundred years since Kondo-Kana helped chase our ancestors out of the Bloodless Lands! They probably think you're her descendant, here to carry on her work.”

  He said it lightly, deciding it was just absurd enough for the villagers to believe, but I only shrugged my shoulders. It didn't matter what year it was or how long it'd been; the villagers were always going to react as they did, blindly following Thane's lead.

  “Anyway, sorry I took so long. I was trying to make them see sense, but they're as thick-headed as ever. And after that...”

  “You wanted to see the Knight,” I said, and he nodded. He didn't seem particularly sorry to have left me alone for so long, but I said, “It's alright. I was curious too. What's she like?”

  “She's—she's like a Knight. She's exactly like a Knight! Forget all those stories I wasted my breath on in the past. Even if you were to cobble them together, you wouldn't get an accurate impression of her. She's what I've been trying to write about all this time. Terrifying – terrifying to a dragon, but you feel echoes of it around her – and beyond powerful,” Michael said, and then paused, rubbing his chin. “Gorgeous, naturally.”

  The concept of a Knight was still an odd one to me. Michael shared stories with me from the day I was born, and Knights always featured; but so did merfolk and goblins. I saw no reason for Knights to have a firmer place in reality than any of the rest. One person, set against a dragon and actually coming out victorious? It made no sense to me. Of course, I'd never seen a dragon before. For all I knew, people exaggerated their size in the same way Michael played up the Knight's virtues.

  “What's her name?” I asked, as if that sliver of knowledge would help me to understand her role in the world.

  “Sir Ightham,” Michael said, practically singing the words.

  It meant nothing to me. The names of Knights were probably well known in the bigger cities, but being as far from Thule as we were, we rarely heard anything from the capital. Our newspapers were always a month out of date, ensuring we'd be the last to know when a new monarch came into power.

  Still, it was nice to know. Sir Ightham. I thought of the creatures she'd faced to earn such a title. Whatever the truth was regarding dragons, I knew for a fact that they put up more of a fight than wolves did.

  “I've got to get back to the hall—there's going to be a feast tonight, and I said I'd help out. To get back on everyone's good side, that sort of thing,” Michael said, making it sound like a momentous chore he reluctantly had to attend to. Making it sound as if he didn't want to spend as much time around the Knight, around Sir Ightham, as was possible. “You should get some rest, though. Make sure you have something to eat. Go back to the house and have someone else tend to the sheep.”

  I held out a hand and let him help me to my feet. He was right about one thing: I was exhausted, body aching, stomach empty. A hot meal and a long sleep in my own bed wasn't going to do anything to fix the mess my life had become, but there was no point in denying myself the basic necessities.

  Michael's gaze trailed over my shoulder, causing him to jump.

  “Is that—” he asked, wide-eyed, and brought a hand to his forehead when he realised that the wolf was dead. “Don't do that to me, Rowan. Causing trouble, was it? Hah, reminds me of the time—”

  “Don't,” I said firmly. Michael fell into a glum silence, lips sealed, and helped carry the wolf back to the farm. My strength faded along with the rush that had taken the wolf down and it was a bit of a pain to get over the fence, but we managed it between us. Michael left me and wolf on our doorstep and hurried back into the village, happy to forget all that had happened to me. In his defence, five months was a long time, and he couldn't be expected to be as miserable as I was forever.

  I pushed the front door open, and called out, “Dad?”

  He'd want to move the wolf, if not skin it before dinner.

  “Out back!” came his reply from the side of the house.

  I left the wolf where it was, not worried about it running off, and headed around to meet my father. He was out by the stables, dragging a pig towards a barn that was only ever used for one thing. Dragging our biggest pig.

  I narrowed my gaze suspiciously, but said, “There's a Knight in the village, you know. But I'm sure Michael's told you already.”

  “Your version's a lot easier to digest,” he said, pausing to smile at me as he tugged the rope around the pig's neck. “They had her horse brought up to the stables, actually. Beautiful creature. Tan as anything.”

  I glanced towards the stables, then back to the pig.

  “I bet the elders weren't happy about that—they really need to rebuild the inn's stables,” I said, arms wrapped around myself. They couldn't very well tell a Knight that there was nowhere to house her horse, I supposed. “What're you doing with that pig?”

  It oinked indignantly at my question.

  “The village is putting on a feast, and they want our prized pig,” my father said, and to his credit, didn't sound as put out about it as I would've.

  “But it could feed us for months!” I protested. I knew what the villagers were bound to do. They'd drain our resources in one fell swoop, eager to convince Sir Ightham that they always lived so lavishly. That our village was worthy of the King and Queen's notice.

  “Now, Rowan. Sir Ightham is our guest, and it's up to us to see to it that she has everything she needs,” my father told me. Infuriatingly, he only ever had kind words for anyone.

  There was a feast held in her honour the night after that, too. In their defence, there was rather a lot of pig to get through. I watched it unfold from the hillside, surrounded by sleeping sheep.

  I closed my eyes, strained my ears, and imagined that I could hear the merriment within the village hall. Everyone but me collectively shirked their responsibilities in favour of celebration, as if the Knight's arrival alone meant that we'd never face another famine again and had been granted immunity from the plague slowly creeping along the coast. I was sure the villagers believed that fortune hadn't deserted us along with our forgotten gods.

  I'd always be on the outside, alone in the hills. Sir Ightham's arrival was a relief of sorts, but it served to highlight all that I was missing. All that I would continue to miss. It was unlikely that another Knight would ever grace our village again, but that didn't mean that opportunities for... for fun, to laugh and actually talk to people who weren't related to me – who weren't sheep – wouldn't present themselves again.

  And as long as the village knew what I was, I'd be denied the chance to indulge in those things.

  I said as much to Michael over breakfast the next
morning, and he blithely shrugged.

  “What are you going to do? Run away? Good luck with that—you don't have the faintest idea how the world works!”

  I didn't. I'd never gone beyond the limits of our village; the elders made sure of that, a thousand years ago, when I was of use to them.

  “I might go,” I said, eager to prove him wrong. “I could find work as... as a healer.”

  “Back to lies again, is it? That's what caused this whole mess in the first place,” Michael chided. “It won't work because you don't want it to work. You want the people to know you're here; you want them to know that they're cut off from the world because of you. Say you leave—what happens then? One of the elders performs a ridiculous cleansing ritual, word spreads, and trade rolls back in. You've cost this village a lot, you know. Don't do the same to some other poor, unsuspecting settlement.”

  “I didn't cost the village anything! I didn't take anything from it—only the things I'd given it in the first place,” I said, voice loud, at first, but fading into an inevitable murmur.

  “Yes, well,” Michael said, bluntly putting an end to the conversation. He got to his feet, chair legs scraping across the tiled floor of our cramped kitchen. “I have to get back to the village. Thane's planning something special for tonight and needs my help.”

  He was gone before it occurred to him to wash his dishes.

  Michael didn't mean to be cruel. He'd often tell our father that he ought to have been born to a scholar, not a farmer, and my father assured me he knew that Michael didn't mean anything by it; he simply had ambitions above his station. He could get a little ahead of himself. In his mind, he was probably already Sir Ightham's personal bard.

  He knew what I was years before the villagers found out and had comforted me with secrets of his own, trusting me to hold power over him, too.

  It didn't compare, not really, but I liked knowing not all of the scholarly expeditions I'd funded were as noble as the village was led to believe. As it turned out, Michael was a skilled forger and had made a little money on the side, as well as a name for himself.

  A strange thing happened in the days that followed. Michael didn't have much to say about Sir Ightham at all; he didn't refine his initial account of her to include the fact that he'd caught sight of her before anyone else, or that she'd made eye contact with him. He didn't boast of speaking to her during the feasts, or even of serving her.

  I'd expected to hear of nothing but Sir Ightham for years to come, but I was actually having to initiate conversations about her. When I did, all he'd say was, “Well, of course I've seen her today—she's still in the village, isn't she? Ask father, wouldn't you? He's seen her too, you realise.”

  Michael spent more time than usual writing letters, commissioned by the elders to boast to the villages and towns that had turned their backs on us.

  Why would we ever need a thing from them when the royal family themselves had requested that we extend our hospitality to one of their Knights? For that was the truth behind her unannounced arrival, according to the rumours my father returned with. She was heading south across the sea, all the way to the scorching sands of Canth, and needed somewhere to rest and prepare herself for the long journey.

  I didn't know they had problems with dragons in Canth. Pirates, yes, but not dragons. I didn't think anywhere but Felheim had problems with dragons; even our neighbours to the west had never suffered the sort of attacks we were plagued by.

  All were convinced that the King and Queen would never forget our hospitality, and would see us repaid in kind. I knew little of our rulers – they were a respected pair who worked tirelessly to keep us safe from dragons, but that was the long and short of it – or our Princes, for that matter.

  I wasn't concerned with them, or the future of our village. I couldn't focus on anything but the fact that Sir Ightham would be gone soon, leaving the villagers with no more distractions. There'd be retaliation for the way I'd dared to wander down to the village, I knew there would be. I left the sheep later and later each night, walking back to the farmhouse with rocks in my stomach.

  I was convinced the elders were waiting for me. It was dark; they could've snuck up from the village without me seeing them move along the dirt path, and what if they were holding my father hostage? What if they wouldn't see him safely released until I'd left, or, or—

  I gave a start as I reached for the front door. There was someone there.

  I gripped the handle and froze. It was faint, but there it was; the sound of heavy footsteps against the ground, wood creaking. They weren't inside the house, whoever they were, and for a brief moment I considered bolting up the stairs and hiding under my blankets.

  Not wanting to back myself into a corner, something compelled me to step around the side of the house. It was probably just a pig that had worked its way free of the pen, that was it. I'd be laughing about this over breakfast, it was just a pig, just a pig—

  Clouds drifted across the full moon, and in the darkness I didn't know what I was seeing. I froze in front of a jagged creature, all teeth and sharp angles, lying in wait, and where was my crook now?

  Out of reach, by some miracle.

  The clouds parted and I realised that I was looking at Sir Ightham herself, armour carved to mirror the beasts she was charged with slaying. What she was doing behind my house at one, perhaps two in the morning wasn't as easily answered. Sir Ightham knew she'd given me a fright, but didn't apologise; she didn't say anything.

  She opened a bag she'd placed atop a hay bale by the stable doors, and pushed a handful of documents into it.

  “Sir... ?” I asked, taking a cautious step closer. “Is everything alright?”

  “Why wouldn't it be?” she replied dryly, slinging a bag over her shoulder.

  Her accent was different from mine. Clearer, somehow, as though words held more importance when she spoke them. She had something folded open across the hay bale and leant forward to study it, full moon not as accommodating as it could've been. I dared to steal a glance, and saw it was a map. A familiar map at that, showing all of Felheim with the mountains above and Kastelir to the west.

  “Because it's one in the morning and you're sneaking around behind my house,” I said after a moment, hands clasped behind my back.

  “Knights don't sneak,” she said, and I winced, thinking this might be what they called speaking out of turn. She folded the map with her gloved hands and dropped it into one of her bags. Sir Ightham turned and I braced myself, but her helm threw shadows across her face. I couldn't see anything in her expression, but did a considerable job of imagining disdain marring her face. She regarded me for a moment and said, quite dismissively, “You're the necromancer, I take it.”

  It wasn't a question. She knew. Like the rest of the village, she knew enough to decide it was all that mattered, and I abruptly became overwhelmingly aware that Knights were in the habit of carrying swords. My eyes tore across her unnatural form. The spikes the elbows of her armour were carved to would do as good a job as any blade.

  But Sir Ightham made no movement other than to ask, “What was your name?”

  It almost skidded off my tongue before I had the chance to speak it.

  “Rowan, Sir,” I said.

  My mind was screaming that she knew, she knew what I was. She'd said the word necromancer as if it was nothing. As if she'd been saying You're the farmer, I take it. I was more helpless than I'd been upon stumbling across an unknowable beast and decided it'd be better for me to disappear into the house and never speak of this.

  “What are you doing out at this time?” she asked.

  She wasn't interested in my answer; she was keeping me distracted while she gathered the remainder of her belongings.

  “I just finished tending to the sheep,” I said, and though I should've known better, added, “Listen—if you're sneaking away, I won't tell anyone. I don't blame you! It must be kind of overwhelming, right? All the attention, I mean.”

  Si
r Ightham stared at me for a moment. At least I thought she was staring at me; I couldn't make her eyes out, but a slither of moonlight struck the ones carved along the sides of her helm and those were certainly narrowed at me.

  “Indeed,” she finally allowed, stepping into the stables.

  I followed her. I hadn't been in there for days. My father never said as much, but I knew the elders had made him swear that I wouldn't go anywhere near the stables while a Knight's horse was being kept there.

  At the time, I didn't know why I went with her. The conversation was hardly flowing, but perhaps I thought her departure sealed my fate; perhaps I thought the villagers would blame me for her unexplained absence. Either way, I followed her, passing my peacefully sleeping horse, until she stood in front of her own.

  It was harder to see within the stables. The darkness there seemed to have taken on form, filling the air between us. As though there was something physical that would protect me, if need be, I said, “You're not going to Canth, are you?”

  That got her attention. She'd been unlatching her horse's pen and doing a fine job of ignoring me up until that point. Stopping what she was doing, she turned to me, and I knew what I had said was as stupid as it was brave.

  “Why do you say that?” Sir Ightham asked, not as dismissive as she'd been moments before.

  “Because there aren't dragons in Canth, are there?” I said, and we both knew that wasn't the reason. “The map you were looking at, it was just of Felheim and Kastelir. Canth wasn't on it at all, so I thought...”

  Sir Ightham brought her hands together. Her arms disturbed the darkness as her armour clattered against itself, not like metal; not like anything I'd heard before.

  “Why do you suppose I might've said I was going to Canth in the first place?” she asked.

  “I don't know,” I said honestly. “Maybe you just wanted an excuse to leave, or maybe—maybe your real work's a secret. I don't... look, I'm really not going to tell anyone about this, Sir.”